Worldwide system demand could reach 18.8 million units embedded in specific vehicles by 2020 if the US mandates V2X. Without these regulations, the worldwide forecast drops to just 5.3 million units, said Kevin Mak, senior analyst in the Automotive Electronics Service (AES) at Strategy Analytics, United Kingdom, and author of a new report entitled "V2X: A Safety Benefit For Automotive, But How Should It Be Deployed?"

"The U.S. mandate could provide the volumes for the economies of scale needed to generate the cost reductions necessary for mass market deployment. This, in turn, could hasten V2X deployment worldwide," Mak told EE Times.

Earlier this year, US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said he was committed to mandating the technology, but the federal agency, National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), still hasn't set a target date. But this isn't unusual as the legislation process has been typically slow when it comes to mandating technology in automotive.

"As for a U.S. mandate, it is likely that should one be implemented, it would be enacted before the end of the Obama term in 2016 and be implemented a year later, in 2017," Mak said. Meanwhile, the Car-2-Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC) in Europe has signed a Memorandum of Understanding, agreeing to have a communication device fitted to at least one model in the range of each participating automaker by 2015, he added.

Implementation of a mandate couldn't come soon enough as the benefits for the automotive industry are huge. The key reason behind DSRC (automotive-standard V2X, called Dedicated Short Range Communication) is to enhance safety, particularly to prevent collisions beyond the line-of-sight of the driver and beyond the range of on-board sensors, such as cameras and RADARs, Mak said. In fact, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said V2X could prevent 70-to-80 percent of crashes of unimpaired drivers and save 20,000 lives a year in the United States.

Despite the enhanced safety features V2X would bring, there are challenges in implementing the technology, including cost, data security, lack of critical mass, and competition from lower-cost mobile phone-based system solutions.

Mak said:

Cost is always an issue in promoting new technologies in automotive, in particular the cost-value analysis that consumers undertake before purchasing a new vehicle. But what will especially affect the value of V2X systems in its nascent years are the lack of other vehicles with V2X and the lack of V2X roadside infrastructure (otherwise known as the "critical mass") that would make V2X operational.

I would expect those with a libertarian stance to instantly oppose any such mandates, but this is not so different from the sorts of regulations governments have had to impose from day 1. Consider just lighting requirements for vehicles. Early cars were lucky to have a kerosene lamp strapped on one side. Or check out how practically invisible the tail lights of even some 1950s cars can be. Never mind visibility from the side, which was zero.

To impose RF comms between cars is not such a stretch, when governments have been imposing optical spectrum specs between cars, for very similar reasons, for decades. Just an evolution of the same requirements.

V2V is one of the hot topics and innovation areas in the coming years. There are a lot of benefit of V2X communication. Safety will likely be improved. In addition, traffic condition can be communicated to the vehicle position system/ driving system to guide driverless algorithm. These are just a few of the many possibility and the current development is far from mature. I wonder why government wants to impose regulation so soon. Are they going to invest so that the technology grows faster?

chanj, the government agency has been "investigating" V2X issues for almost a decade. They have not been so forthcoming until now -- largely because a lot of testing they had to do , but more because of some oppositions (as Bert mentioned as "knee-jerk" reactions)

V2V, or Car-to-Car, will happen; but V2I, or vehicle to infrastructure, will be slow because that requires the budget the state government is not willing to shell out. Under the current political climate in the United States, it will be hard.

The downside of the government agency taking a sweet time in testing a new scheme like V2X is that while they are engaged in testing, the technology advances by leaps and bounds.

For example, DSRC is a good technology. But considering that every car will soon to have a modem technology (to get connected with services like GM OnStar) or every driver will have a cell phone brought inside a car, the architecture of V2X should consider how to integrate the power of cellular communication in the context of mandating DSRC. I don't think this has been tested or architected.